Say Something, Sam!

The future of shopping is… almost here. Though we are not quite at the technological standards of the projected future in the hit film Minority Report, there have been some incredible developments in the areas of online shopping. With billboards that can watch you while you shop and read your shopping habits, and touch screen monitors that aid salespersons in providing their customers with an interactive shopping experience via webcam, the potential for online shopping is endless. The example shown below is still a pretty new innovation that has not been entirely embraced by society as a whole, but through it, we can catch a glimpse of what is to come.

Sometimes I wonder if it is because humans have a sort of innate nomadic nature that we are so obsessed with having everything mobile and portable. We have created travelling versions of many products, for instance, mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and even miniature USB drives. It is therefore almost inevitable that e-commerce will take a step in the direction of mobile-commerce in the near future, where people will start to shop via their mobile phones whilst on the go.

With this in mind, and placed alongside the fact that people living in bustling cities often find themselves strapped for time, Tesco has come up with a novel way for people to shop for groceries, whilst at the same time saving themselves the trip to the actual store.

This is not the only instance of companies attempting to marry the virtual world with the physical world. Following Tesco’s initiative, Fox and HMV teamed up to create a virtual store selling BluRay and DVD movies. Using the same technology behind Tesco’s virtual grocery stores which were set in subway stations in Korea, Fox and HMV created their virtual stores at bus stops in the UK.

The retailers encourage people to use their smartphones as tools for shopping, by using QR codes, which are pixelated square barcodes that can be read using smartphones. When the customers scan the QR codes with the cameras on their smartphones, they are redirected to the online store on their mobile devices, where they can easily purchase their selected items.

Though the whole concept of shopping off your mobile phone might be slightly daunting and new, there is a large possibility that this will start off a new trend for e-commerce, and with the mad rush to shop in time for Christmas, it is pretty possible that consumers will take advantage of this innovation and shop away.

Armed with a camera phone and an internet connection, citizens are essentially empowered with the tools needed to instantaneously post the strange happenings in the world around them up on the internet. As I have already established in my post on social networking sites, people feel a strong desire to share and publicise things because of the attention it draws from others. This urge is, of course, encouraged by various news and media outlets, as it veritably increases the number of hits on their websites by leaps and bounds.

Through websites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Blogger, people are equipped with a channel for self-expression, and a limitless flow of viewers. This allows every one of us to be reporters of sorts. Yes, you included.

In Singapore, one of the most famous websites that supports citizen journalism is STOMP. To encourage people to share on the site, a small fee is paid for every article that is uploaded and shared. Don’t get your hopes up though, what you get for each article is only a meagre sum. It’s probably only enough to buy you a plate of chicken rice at a coffee shop.

Once an article is uploaded, readers (or rather, ‘STOMPers’) get to decide how they feel about it with the localised voting system. The STOMPers can also comment on the article. However, as these anonymous STOMPers are safely hidden behind their computer screens, the comments tend to be more offensive in nature. ‘Flaming’ of the STOMPer who posted the article, or of the people whom the STOMPer wrote about is definitely not unusual.

This brings me to the point of how STOMP is typically used. Despite the website being a subsidiary of the national newspaper, the Straits Times, STOMP is, in my honest opinion, trash. The ‘articles’ posted on STOMP are generally quite similar to those seen in tabloids. Pictures of people whom the STOMPers deem to be inconsiderate or bizarre are taken secretly and uploaded without permission. These photos are usually accompanied by badly written snippets of text describing the incident. What a sorry excuse for ‘citizen journalism’.

From my point of view, STOMP desperately needs a team of people, who take pride in providing good unbiased news, to filter through the mountains of crap that the typical self-proclaimed citizen journalists send in. Either that or they ought to hire a really good editor (who of course is impartial and unprejudiced) to help regulate the flow of articles that gets sent in on a daily basis, because if what people read on STOMP is genuinely considered newsworthy, I fear greatly for the future of Singapore.

For people like me who are easily captivated by pretty things, people and words, the Internet can be a major time suck. Often, my days are whiled away just staring at the pixels on my computer screen that make up any number of images. One of the websites that I frequent too much is Tumblr.

Tumblr is a micro-blogging website which provides a very user-friendly interface for posting multimedia such as text passages, videos, pictures, quotes, and music. The developers even boast about Tumblr being “the easiest way to blog” on the sign up page. Sounds simple, right? Well Tumblr also has a rather unique feature called ‘reblog’. Similar to the concept of ‘retweeting’ on Twitter, reblogging means to share something that someone has already shared on your own Tumblr blog. It is through this reblogging feature that people find common ground with each other, in terms of things they appreciate. When you find a Tumblr blog that you like, you can simply click ‘follow’ to make sure that new posts to that Tumblr blog will surely find their way onto your dashboard.

Another thing that makes Tumblr so successful as a multimedia sharing website is its ‘endless scroll’ feature. When browsing on your dashboard, posts are arranged in chronological order, starting with the most recent. As you scroll down to view earlier posts, the page continues loading post after post as you scroll. That means that there is essentially no end to the amount of posts you can view on Tumblr. As long as you keep scrolling down, older posts from people you follow will appear on your dashboard. This causes users to forget how long they’ve been on the website, as they are continually engaged and mesmerised by the endless amount of multimedia.

Given the proliferation of the internet, and the typical internet user’s penchant for time-wasting websites, you can definitely expect that Tumblr is an extremely popular site. Due to its fool-proof interface, Tumblr allows for anyone to easily share multimedia of many sorts. As such, many self-made designers and artists use Tumblr as a platform to showcase their works and to garner much needed publicity for their products.

One last thing, Tumblr is in no way merely a place to look at things people post. It is also a place to interact with multimedia (click me!), as well as with other individuals. People can comment on posts, and include their input when reblogging something. Also, through Tumblr’s ‘ask’ function, strangers from all over the world can ask you questions, whether anonymously or not, and as I’ve mentioned before, you can enjoy the things people post simply by following them. As such, Tumblr can also be considered to be a social networking site.

It is the combination of all these features that makes Tumblr such a popular multimedia-sharing, micro-blogging, social networking site.

“Thousands of online accounts are hijacked every day. If you re-use your Gmail password on other websites, change it now.”

Google prompted me with that line when I signed into Gmail this morning, which made me ever so anxious, as like many other people, I’ve been reusing the same password for many of my online accounts. I have changed my passwords since, but it got me thinking about how secure passwords can be.

Did you know that the most common password is ‘password’? A leading provider of password software, SplashData, released a list of the 25 worst passwords of 2011 with ‘password’ and ‘123456’ filling the top two spaces on the list. Perhaps at age 10, you’d think that having ‘password’ as your password was the most genius thing ever, but seriously, if that is your password right now, you should really consider changing it. In fact, if you are using any of the 25 worst passwords please do yourself a favour and opt for something slightly more secure.

The 25 Worst Passwords of the Year (2011)

Password security is one of the most important things that you have to think about in this day and age, as if your password were to fall into the wrong hands, there is much at stake. Identity theft, fraud, monetary loss, and access to confidential data are some of the consequences of havin

g your online accounts hacked into, and we don’t want any of that to happen, do we?

Here are a few tips from the experts on how to create a strong password:

• Use pass
  words with 8 characters or more, with mixed character types.
• If you’re afraid that you might forget your password, use short easy to remember phrases.
• E.g “Guess_who?” or “ki55 my 5a55!”
• As Google has already reminded us, avoid using the same username and password combination for different websites, as this makes your various accounts especially easy to hack into. So always use different passwords for every site that you sign up for.
• If you feel like you won’t be able to remember all those different usernames and passwords, try using a password manager application that organises and protects your various passwords, and helps you login to sites automatically.

Creating a secure password is easy, so long as you put in the effort. So go ahead and keep those crafty hackers guessing. Remember, prevention is always better than cure!

I love Youtube for the infinite hours of entertainment it provides, so here’s me giving back. This is a video from back in 2009 of myself and my brother from another mother, Ed, singing randomly in his kitchen.

It isn’t perfect, but what the hey!

Enjoy!

Hey you! Yes, you! Imagine you have to write a 20 page research paper (12pt Times New Roman, double-spaced). How would you go about it? Would you go to your neighbourhood library to pull out 20 year old articles from dusty journals, or would you sit in your easy chair with a laptop on your lap, and retrieve said articles from an online database?

Since you’re clearly reading this on the internet, it’s probably safe to say that you’d take the latter route. In this day and age, the internet is being increasingly used to aid learning. Can you imagine having to do hard research without the help of the internet?

With the WWW, we are armed with a powerful tool for learning. Unanswered questions can simply be answered by searching them up on search engines, like Google. Definitions for strange and difficult words can be looked up on online dictionary databases, without having to flip through an actual dictionary. Tutorials to almost everything can be found in either text, picture or video form. Heck, you can even find out how to make a DIY bomb if you know where to look.

The limits for learning online are virtually endless!

Yet, it is needless to say that there are two sides to this coin. With every instance of positive learning that takes place online, there is potentially another instance of abuse. An example of this takes place within the e-learning tool Turnitin which helps lecturers prevent academic plagiarism. It has an online compilation which is chock-a-block full of text articles and papers that were once submitted on Turnitin. When a new essay is submitted to Turnitin, the program scans the entire body of text and searches for matches (of 5 words or more) within its constantly updated database of articles. The percentage of text segments that were quoted or taken from other sources is then calculated.

“How can this e-learning tool be abused?” you may ask.

Look at this scenario: Kelly and Sandra have to write a 15 page research paper on Cows. Sandra, being a hardworking and studious girl, finishes her research paper within the week. However, Sandra lacks in a certain area – her English sucks. Kelly, on the other hand, has an excellent grasp of the English language, so Sandra sends Kelly her paper hoping that she’d help weed out her mistakes. Kelly receives Sandra’s paper, makes the necessary grammatical changes, and then submits the paper on Turnitin as her own. (Bitch!) Sandra later unwittingly sends the paper to Turnitin and is accused of plagiarism.

E-learning should not be taken as a bad thing though. The internet is an information highway, and access to knowledge has never been this easy. But, as with most things, it is up to the individual how he or she uses it. In my opinion, the internet environment is changing into one which greatly aids learning (I mean, you can even finish up your degree online!), and it will only keep improving.

Have you ever experienced an onslaught of popup ads, filling up your entire screen and overheating your CPU? I have. Worse still, I was only 12. Furthermore, the popups came from a porn website, which my friend had accidentally wandered onto while looking for 9.87 FM’s website (they used to be called Perfect 10, but guess what happens when you Google Perfect 10 and click on the first website that appears). The popups probably infected the computer with some sort of virus, but it’s a good thing that the computer belonged to my friend (hehe!).

Ads and I have a love hate relationship. Sometimes they’re so fantastic and funny and heart-warming, and other times, they’re annoying and tiresome and stupid. One thing is for sure though, ads are almost everywhere, and holing yourself up in your room with just your trusty computer and the internet is not going to stop you from being exposed to advertising.

With the birth of the internet came the emergence of a new platform for advertising, and with that came a slew of various advertisements, ranging from website banners to popups and spam. Thankfully, many websites have done away with the use of irritating popup ads (God forbid that those ever make a return), and computers with good antivirus software are (kind of) protected from those evil Trojan horse ads that install malware onto their victims’ computers.

Web banners and in-text ads are a couple of the more common ads that we see floating around the internet nowadays. You might even see them when you’re reading a friend’s blog, for instance. One of the reasons why you would see ads being hosted on blogs is because there are companies dedicated to mediating between their advertising clients and bloggers, by giving clients a frequented virtual space for ads, and bloggers some revenue for hosting them. Nuffnang is one such local company.

Now, of course we’re seeing more and more instances of guerrilla advertising via Youtube (I’m sure we can all remember the incident with the bear along Ulu Pandan road) and other social media, not forgetting commercials that are disguised as games (e.g. Hotel 626 for Doritos), shows, and the sort.

The good thing about online advertising is that it is a cheaper alternative to ads in newspapers and on television, and is something that Google claims will help increase physical in-store revenue. On the other hand, what is scary about online advertising is, in short, personalised advertising.

Personalised advertising is a form of marketing in which the advertiser chooses specific content to promote to individuals. Google and other search engines already employ a form of this by showing ads for things that you are searching for. Social media sites do this by matching ads with things that you show preference for. Not only that, did you know that some websites are able to track your internet usage through cookies even after you’ve purportedly logged off? *Points finger at Facebook*

Well, it is up to you to decide whether an ad is or isn’t ethical, but as with every issue, there are always going to be two sides of a coin. Whatever the pros and cons for advertising online are, it is safe to say that it does play its part in helping people earn real money, and that’s the whole point about e-commerce isn’t it?

Initially, I had intended on exploring the unknown territories of Google Plus for the sake of this article, but while registering for an account, I was prompted to add a photo of myself so my friends would be able to recognise me. It was then that I realised that Google Plus conveniently allowed me to use photos off my old and private blog that was on Blogger (a Google-owned blogging platform).

Now, the photos are definitely not of any explicit nature (I have none of the sort), so don’t let your imaginations go running, but that does not mean that I want anyone seeing any images that I have not personally approved for viewing. This easy integration of my personal details from Google’s other web tools scared me, even though I have been using, and pretty much trusting, Google for years. Thus I immediately cancelled the registration process and exited the Google Plus page.

This got me thinking about all the information I have willingly shared on Facebook. Ask anyone who knows me about my Facebook activity, and they would definitely agree that I am one of those people who are constantly on Facebook. Be it to update myself on my friends’ lives, share things that I ‘like’, play silly flash games, tag ugly pictures of people, or even to check up on the boyfriend (oops!); I probably spend about 4 to 5 hours a day on Facebook alone.

Am I addicted to Facebook? I think so. I disabled my account one day, in an attempt to remove a major distraction from my studying schedule. I enabled it again after half an hour because there was something I found that I wanted to share with my friends.

The thing about social networking sites is that we are the authors of our own profiles. We are given the flexibility to allow people to view certain things, and to ensure exclusivity for others (though nobody is really sure if the privacy controls on Facebook actually work). We are not only consumers of information, we are also producers.

As Kenneth Seah has so kindly pointed out in his post, one of the main reasons why people use social networking sites is to fulfil their need for attention. Why on earth would Facebook come up with a ‘poke’ function otherwise? Poking someone just screams ‘Look at me! Hey! Hey! Look at me!’

Social networking sites give its users the chance to publicise themselves and to scramble for the attention that they probably do not get in the real world. Perhaps it is this yearning for attention that encourages people to over share on the Internet. Currently, I am contemplating leaving Facebook for good because I am so heavily invested in its services. The amount of information available about me feels like a shadow looming over me. It is so easy for anyone with access to my profile to literally read me like a book, without even having to meet me face to face! I wonder if anyone, like me, has felt that maybe they are revealing a bit too much? Is Facebook a liability?

A friend once sent me a message on Facebook with a link to a photo. It was a photo of two of our female acquaintances, who were drunk and flashing their freshly pierced nipples to the camera. The next day, the photo was deleted from the album, and the incident was treated as though it had never actually happened. However, as my friend had sent me the direct URL to the image, it was still directly accessible to us. Despite having been removed from plain sight (i.e. deleting the image from the photo album), the image still exists somewhere on the Facebook servers, and can easily be retrieved with the image URL (no, you’re not allowed to see it).

This says tons about Facebook’s delete policy. Is something that has been deleted really gone? Or is it still inconspicuously floating around on the internet? This incident happened more than 2 years ago, but I just checked and yes, the photo is still around. Is it even possible to unshare something that you had once so readily shared?

The moral of the story is: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say share can and will be used against you.

With all the advancements of Web 2.0, the Internet has become a dynamic virtual playground for its users. Internet users have become increasingly enabled, all in the comfort of their homes. Granted the ability to not even get out of their seats, people have taken to doing much of what they would normally do in the physical world online. One of these things, which incidentally is one of my absolute favourite online activities, is shopping.

E-Commerce involves the buying and selling of goods on an electronic platform (i.e. the Internet) instead of in a store, and aided by current technological standards, shopping online has really become incredibly idiot-proof. Not only is it very easy, but there are thousands upon thousands of credible shopping sites on the infinite reaches of the Internet.

What if the shopping site is not based in your country? Fret not, there are companies created for the specific purpose of shipping your overseas goods at much cheaper rates, like Hopshopgo, which gives you a P.O. box address in the U.S. to direct your purchases to, and then ships your items directly to you.

What if you don’t own a credit card? There are other means of paying for your online purchases, for instance via PayPal which is a form of online currency. All you have to do is transfer your actual money into your PayPal account from your bank account.

Locally, there are a couple of shopping sites that come to mind when I think of e-commerce. One of them is Groupon, and the other, Reebonz. I would say that both these sites are rather big hits with Singaporeans, especially Groupon, from which people can purchase heavily discounted coupons for use in the ‘real world’. The idea behind Reebonz is also pretty clever – people can buy discounted branded goods from the website, and even pay for their items in installments. How tempting is that?

Many people are trying to jump on the bandwagon, and tons of ‘blogshops’ have popped up online. These are mostly set up by aspiring young entrepreneurs, but also include people who just want to get rid of things they don’t use or wear. Some of these people even go back to the ancient practice of barter trade to exchange things they don’t want any more for things that they might have some use for. A fantastic example of this is the Red Paper Clip project, in which a man traded a red paper clip for a house.

Of course, there are drawbacks that come with shopping online, the main problem being security issues. With more and more shopping sites saving shoppers’ information in their databases, for the sake of convenient shopping, there comes the amplified risk of hackers gaining access to not only shoppers’ personal details, but also their credit card numbers. Despite this, there are still many reasons to shop online, and the dangers of doing so can be combatted with safe online shopping practices.

With that, I’m going to conclude today’s post, and go back to what I was doing before – window shopping on the WWW!

Approximately 30 years after the introduction of the Internet to the general public, the Internet has become somewhat of a staple in the average tech-savvy person’s technological diet. Despite being first created to serve military purposes (the US army needed to be able to manage its missiles), the Internet has managed to weasel its way into our personal lives, thus achieving its intended goal – to control.

The grasp that the Internet has on us is one that is both firm and undeniable. I, for one, am one of those who feels handicapped when I do not have access to the Internet for more than a day or two. Who hasn’t heard of the local saying that “Google is my best friend”? People depend on the Internet for so much; it is a means of communication, attaining information, social networking, banking, purchasing, selling, entertainment… and the list goes on.

I remember the days that I spent in London, leeching off my neighbour’s Wi-Fi, and pining for a more stable connection (it disconnected every few minutes). The Internet installation company was so overloaded with requests that my housemates and I were put on a month-long waiting list. Being stuck using such a terrible connection made us so jittery from being offline, that we walked to the nearest cyber cafe on an almost daily basis just to use the Internet. Just imagine the widespread revolt that would occur if the Internet might be snatched from a country (think Egypt).

We are so reliant on the Internet now, for so many things, including expressing ourselves, that our virtual persona might just be as important to us as our identity itself. In that sense, the Internet has a very large extent of control over those of us who are not technophobes. Given the upper hand that the Internet has over its users, it is pretty blatant that the Internet is going to be around for a long time. This is already shown in the way that the Internet has been integrated with so many things and activities around us. Perhaps there will come a time where humans will find themselves physically fitted with Internet capabilities as well.